(This seems like a long post, but it is about one of the most important experiences I’ve had in a classroom in a long while.)

As a part of a project in which students are writing poems to be included in a collected ebook, I had the opportunity this week to teach several groups of middle school students about copyright and open content. (I am often frustrated by teachers telling kids to “just get any image from Google to include in your Powerpoint/Word doc.”)

Facilitating this discussion with kids was tremendously enjoyable and thought-provoking. I am sure that I learned as much as they did (and I think they learned a lot).

Here are a few of my big take-aways:

1. Relevance leads to critical thinking and engaged learning. Copyright is a topic that is immediately relevant to kids — as a result, they were highly interested and had a ton of questions, comments, and thoughts. While they were engaged, I was able to insert other topics from math, writing, and reading. I think this is a key to improving learning (and it doesn’t flow naturally from a textbook or a pacing guide).

2. In general, kids want to be legal. They are, however, seriously uninformed. (When asked about what they knew about copyright, many confused it with plagiarism. They think this is a what-I-can-do-in-school issue rather than a legal issue.) They had many questions about what they needed to do to be legal.

3. The filesharing tools these kids use (almost universally) are Lime Wire and Photobucket. For those not in the know, Lime Wire is P2P file sharing software, apparently used by kids for exchanging music illegally (being used as the new Napster or Grokster). I believed most of the kids when they told me that they didn’t understand the legal issues involved with this. Their big concern with the service: viruses.

4. Most kids were not aware of the fundamental premise of Wikipedia: that anyone can edit it. This was shocking to me. When they understood this, they found it very empowering. (Together, we edited an article about their school district — something that you’d never find on Encarta or EB.) This led to a very sophisticated discussion about the pros and cons of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. These kids got it a lot faster than most adults. We also talked about vandalism, wikispam, and version control.

5. Once the students understood the basics of copyright and open content, they quickly began discussing some pretty high level concepts about intellectual property. Unprovoked by me, they asked about financial issues, transference of copyright, IP address tracking, use of personal images (image release issues), paparazzi photos, parodies (as they relate to fair use), and lots more. It was phenomenal.

6. Kids are all over Firefox and view it as a better browser.

7. They were not familiar with the term “open source.” On the other hand, they expressed a universal contempt for Microsoft (to an extent that I found a little scary, but what a force for the OER community to harness).

8. Only one kid out of about 150 had ever heard of Creative Commons. How had he heard of it? YouTube.

9. They enjoyed finding open content that is legal to use in their projects. They were surprisingly adept at finding and understanding the licenses (CC, GFDL, public domain) and at including appropriate credits for the pieces used in their own work.

10. Kids who often appear bored and lacking in critical thinking and articulate communication skills suddenly seem like geniuses when they are discussing something that matters to them.
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What fun! My mind is still reeling at all the epiphanies I had during these few days.

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[For a lesson plan and accompanying resources for this, visit www.tinyurl.com/5qahht.]

As a part of the fun I’m having contributing to Wikijunior (part of Wikibooks, offering free, open content textbooks), I’ve taken an animal alphabet book there and made video and ebook versions of it.

They’re available for viewing and download here.

There are versions for the desktop, various handhelds, iPods, and even a Mobipocket ebook version. (One of the not-fun things about creating video is all the format issues. I think we’ve put about everything up here, but let me know if anything’s been missed.)

If you haven’t ventured into the world of contributing to wikis, Wikijunior is a great place to start. (Try the Human Body book or Ancient Civilizations.) The more people who contribute to these free “copyleft” resources, the better they will be. If you’re not sure how to start, try something small like fixing an error or just adding a couple sentences. It’s a lot of fun!

At NECC last week, I presented a session called “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate and Enrich Instruction.” The ISTE folks had wanted to podcast the session, but I wasn’t crazy about the legal agreement they were using. (It wasn’t Creative Commons and gave pretty extensive rights to Apple.)

So….I created my own digital version of this session for folks to download:

Video version (streaming, for viewing in a browser; loads faster, but lower quality)

If anyone is interested in a higher resolution version to share with folks who weren’t able to attend, email me, and I’ll try to send you a CD.

For those who are interested, I audio recorded this with a very inexpensive Olympus WS-100 pocket recorder. I edited the audio in Audacity and brought it all into Windows Movie Maker for editing. The visuals included exported jpgs from my presentation slides and screen-capture videos made with Camstudio. I used HandShare to create the Palm movies (which is the same software I used to present). Creating the whole thing took about 4 hours.

It was a lot of fun making this and was a good way to reflect on my own style of presenting (and hopefully refine it for upcoming events).

I hope this is a useful resource for you all.

I love Wikipedia and the collaborative approach to creation that it represents, but as with any information resource, Wikipedia is not all things to all people. One area where it is problematic for schools is that it contains some content that is not child appropriate. Also, as an “open environment” it is always changing…which is potentially both good and bad.

To address this, SOS Children and a group of dedicated volunteers have now launched Wikipedia for Schools. This is a subset of the best Wikipedia articles that are child-friendly and educationally-oriented and have been correlated to the UK National Curriculum. It is “frozen” so that vandalism, etc. are not concerns, and you can even download it as a DVD. What a great project!

With the increasing wealth of “copyleft” and Open Source content that’s out there, I’ve been thinking about a variety of potential projects like this. Examples include adapting Wiktionary for student use (especially on mobile devices), creating a CD of Open Source art, photos, video and music for student project creation, organizing a list of public domain ebooks by reading level, and more.

There is so much value in this content and providing it in a monitored, safe environment and format would help speed its adoption. It would definitely take a big group of volunteers to work on it though. Would free screened resources like this be of interest to your school? Would you be interested in helping put it together?

[Image of Wikipedia logo is a registered trademark of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.]

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I went to an interesting speech by the Director of the USDOE’s Office of Education Technology yesterday. In the presentation, he contrasted textbooks and Wikipedia as information resources. He said that textbooks have “authoritative content,” but face “distribution problems.” ( I think he meant usability problems. He mentioned the heavy backpack problem.) Wikipedia, he went on to say, has wonderful distribution, but a problem with a lack of authoritative content. (He cited what I thought was not a very representative example.)

I had just presented a session at which I’d made the claim that textbooks aren’t very useful to most students today. (And I worked in textbook publishing for almost 10 years, so you can imagine how much it hurts me to say that.) On the other hand, my view on Wikipedia has shifted over the last year or so. I now think it is a pretty good resource.

Then on my way to work this morning, I heard a piece on NPR called “A Look at How the U.S. Understanding of its Own History Changes.” It traced the treatment of the Mexican-American war by textbooks over time. As you might imagine, it varied considerably. (Heck, we can’t even agree on the cause of the war we’re in right now.)

So, what does all this mean? Perhaps that no one source of information, including textbooks, should be considered to be “authoritative.” Some of the most important things we can teach kids in this age of information are to be critical information consumers, to use multiple sources, and not to treat anything as unquestional “fact.”

I hear a lot of interesting talk at schools these days about Wikipedia. If you aren’t familiar with Wikipedia, it proclaims itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

The conversations about Wikipedia around schools range from schools who are banning it as a valid research resource to those to aren’t aware of how Wikipedia differs from other souces like Encyclopaedia Britannica or Encarta. (Many teachers seem to have picked up on the “free” part, but not the fact that it is editable by anyone.)

So, back to “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”…??? I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up I thought that encyclopedias were something created by really smart guys somewhere, not just anyone. As a result, my initial reaction to Wikipedia was skepticism.

However, research has shown that the accuracy of Wikipedia is comparable to mainstream sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica. (This is the power of active wikis. More on that in a future post.) My own experience with Wikipedia is that it gives you everything that more traditional sources gives you plus a lot more.

The real point here that we as educators need to help our students understand is that no source of information is definitive. Every source has its strengths and weaknesses, its biases and perspectives.

When I use Wikipedia (or any other research resource, for that matter), I generally open it in one browser windows and another source in another window. (It’s sometimes amazing to find three or four different reputable resources with completely different portrayals of the “facts.”)

In the current days of the Internet, podcasts, wikis, and more new sources of information every day, we should all be critical consumers of information and use multiple sources. Given that, Wikipedia is usually on my list of sources to consult.